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Oracle bigs up 7000 ZFS storage line

Mystery top-end product

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Beyond this little conundrum the ZFS Storage Appliance line has the same hierarchical storage pools fog the 7000s, the same DTrace facilities and the same ZFS capabilities. Mark Peters, a senior analyst for the Enterprise Strategy Group, believes the 7000 Series “is time-and-market-proven, and has added scale and performance with these latest upgrades, any excuses for not taking a look are getting pretty hard to come by”.

Oracle brags that the ZFS Storage Appliance product line is the only unified storage solution that combines in-line deduplication and compression, has end-to-end data and metadata checksums, self-healing data technology and triple-parity RAID, and the industry’s fastest storage controllers with industry-leading amounts of DRAM and flash cache. All this is no doubt true. The products have been integrated with Oracle Applications, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Database, Oracle Solaris, Oracle Linux and Oracle VM, and have three data protection possibilities for Oracle Applications: Oracle RMAN, database cloning, and disaster recovery using Fusion middleware.

The 7x20 ZFS Storage Appliance products look to be a clear advance on the initial 7000 generation and should be stronger competition for other unified file and block storage products such as those from NetApp. It appears to us at The Reg that these boxes compete with the CLARiiON-type mid-range arrays but not with high-end SAN arrays such as VMAX, USP-V and DS8000.

In that area Oracle appears to believe that massively powerful, integrated IT stack boxes such as the Exadata and Exalogic are the way to go, unless the 7720 actually has a role in building out a new high-end network-access array capability that will appear over the next few months. For now it seems to us that Oracle has no product that can compete on equal terms with the VMAX, USP-V and DS8000 arrays.

No ZFS Storage Appliance pricing and availability information was supplied by Oracle. According to ESG, all models are due to be available in October, except for the 7720, which is due in November. ®